WordPress Release – Is WordPress 4.6 Release Imminent?

Those you who are eagle-eyed, will have noticed a flurry of WordPress theme updates came out today – the themes authored and maintained by the WordPress team, have all updated by a decimal increment, ie, TwentyTen updated from 2.1 to 2.2, TwentyFourteen updated from 1.7 to 1.8 and TwentySixteen updated from 1.2 to 1.3. Those are just 3 of the themes updated today – all the TwentyNN themes updated today (TwentyTen, TwentyEleven, TwentyTwelve, TwentyThirteen, TwentyFourteen, TwentyFifteen and TwentySixteen.

“Well so what?” we hear you ask… and this is what… WordPress 4.7 is due to be released in August – we’re in August. And every time the WordPress team releases a new found of the core software, they have been updating the WordPress released themes.. so – and this is our theory – we think they’re reversing the order this time – release the themes first, and then releasing the core software!

Why reverse the order? It reduces the bandwidth spike, cpu spike and memory spike on their release infrastructure! It’s clever – and it’s practical – and we think they wouldn’t do this unless we were a day or two away from WordPress 4.6. Anyway – that’s our theory – and we’re sticking to it.. our prediction is that today, tomorrow or in the next 72 hours, we’ll get a new WordPress core software update.

So – should you update WordPress core as soon as it is available?

No – we are going to say that you could wait a while – especially if you are using third-party plugins and themes. Let someone else do the testing of new WordPress + your fancy paid theme. If there is a small patch after a day or two, it will be to fix something that doesn’t play well, and could possibly break the site. WordPress releases aren’t the big ‘dice-roll’ that they once were, but better safe than sorry.. wait a day or two.

As always, backup your site, the database, all the plugins and all the themes before applying such a big update – and if you do break your site – roll back your site to the backup!

Now might be a good time to think about Managed WordPress – call or email us for details.